When Worlds Collide

Meet Dr. Bosca. He's on duty at Washington Hospital in Culver City, California, when Jon from CHiPs is brought in after interacting with a bomb-toting hitchhiker also carrying a fatal rare disease.

He imposes a two-week quarantine on the CHP headquarters. Probably in a smarmy manner.

This, apparently, long after he finished medical school under the partial tutelage of one Victor Frankenstein, whom he tormented with questions about vermicelli.

This is, of course, Danny Goldman, who really makes his mark in Young Frankenstein:

Looks like he died in 2020. Was just a little younger than my mother.

Thank You, Mister Jones

With the passing of Terry Jones, I find my thoughts wandering through Monty Python but settling on Ripping Yarns.

Now I’m a big Python fan. But Ripping Yarns. More subtle humor – as satire often is.

And maybe it’s because I connect Ripping Yarns, specifically the episode “The Testing of Eric Olthwaite” with my Dad, who loved how boring Eric was and how obsessed he was with shovels.

And whenever I’m feeling excited, I say this, from Eric: “It were hard to accept I were boring. Especially with my interest in rainfall.”

I just love the absurdity and imagine what fun it must have been to write and produce such stuff. The British, I’m thankful, have a long love for the absurd. I’m not sure this kind of absurdity could get made in the United States nowadays. Maybe earlier. And maybe not even in England now. But for what it was, when it was made, it was glorious to behold.

Also, Ripping Yarns fed my need to identify obscure character actors in different roles. Thanks to this, I got to see Denholm Elliott, David Griffin, and Roy Kinnear in places I didn’t expect them.

Then there was the time I recognized HIM as the obscure character actor.

To Ze Lumberyaaaaard!

Used here under the fair use doctrine for commentary purposes.

Maybe he got tired of being recognized as Inspector Kemp. Or Marshal Wooly Billy Hitchcock. Or Franz Liebkind.

But I doubt it.

Kenneth Mars. Just another example of the kind of character actors I like. Why? Because he becomes the character, as all great character actors do. Too many actors simply play themselves in whatever role they might find themselves in, without giving much thought as to how their character might act, or think, or behave. Seen one Meg Ryan or Tom Hanks movie and you’ve pretty much seen them all. The character actors around them, however, are the ones I remember the most.